The trail is named for Jesse Chisholm, who had built several trading posts in what was then Indian Territory and is now central Oklahoma before the American Civil War. Immediately after the war, he and the LenapeBlack Beaver collected stray Texas cattle and drove them to railheads over the Chisholm Trail,[citation needed] shipping them back East to feed citizens, where beef commanded much higher prices than in the West.

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Business aspects[edit]

By 1853, Texas cattle were being driven into Missouri, where local farmers began blocking herds and turning them back because the Texas Longhorns carried ticks that caused diseases in other types of cattle. Violence, vigilante groups, and cattle rustling caused further problems for the drovers. By 1859, the driving of cattle was outlawed in many Missouri jurisdictions. By the end of the Civil War, most cattle were being moved up the western branch of trail at Red River Station in Montague County, Texas.

In 1866, cattle in Texas were worth only $4 per head, compared to over $40 per head in the North and East, because lack of market access during the American Civil War had led to over stock of cattle in Texas. In 1867, Joseph G. McCoy built stockyards in Abilene, Kansas. He encouraged Texas cattlemen to drive their herds to his stockyards. The stockyards shipped 35,000 head that year and became the largest stockyards west of Kansas City, Kansas.

That same year, O. W. Wheeler answered McCoy's call, and he along with partners used the Chisholm Trail to bring a herd of 2,400 steers from Texas to Abilene. This herd was the first of an estimated 5,000,000 head of Texas cattle to reach Kansas over the Chisholm Trail.[1][2]

In 1931, Geo. W. Saunders, then President of the Old Trail Drivers Association and an authority on Texas livestock history wrote: "The famed Chisholm Trail, about which more has been written than any other Southwestern Trail, cannot be traced in Texas for the reason that it never existed in this State." It was always understood by pioneer cattlemen that they would strike the Chisholm Trail at Red River Station at the mouth of Salt Creek in Montague Co. into the Indian Territory.[citation needed]

Challenges[edit]

On the long trips — up to two months — the cattlemen faced many difficulties. They had to cross major rivers such as the Arkansas and the Red, and innumerable smaller creeks, plus the topographic challenges of canyons, badlands and low mountain ranges. The weather was less than ideal. In addition to these natural dangers, rustlers and occasional conflicts with Native Americans erupted. The latter demanded that drovers, the trail bosses, pay a toll of 10 cents a head to local tribes for the right to cross Indian lands (Oklahoma at that time was Indian Territory, governed from Fort Smith, Arkansas). The half-wild Texas Longhorn cattle were contrary and prone to stampede with little provocation.

Chisholm Trail Heritage Center, located in Duncan, Oklahoma, is an interactive museum dedicated to the history of the Chisholm Trail. It also has a large monument depicting a scene from the Chisholm Trail cattle drive, as well as a trail walkway.[6]

On September 26, 2009, a historical marker on the Chisholm Trail was unveiled at the site of Red River Station in Montague County. The 5.5-foot concrete marker is the last of twelve erected in Montague County as part of a joint project of the Texas Lakes and Trails and the Montague County Historical Commission to outline the Chisholm Trail (as said in Wichita Falls Times Record News).